Business

New initiative will use targeted ads to raise money for Nepal earthquake relief

A Nepalese woman injured in the earthquake rests at Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, Tuesday, May 12, 2015. A major earthquake hit Nepal near the Chinese border between the capital of Kathmandu and Mount Everest less than three weeks after the country was devastated by a quake.

After a deadly magnitude-7.3 earthquake struck Nepal on Tuesday, an aftershock of the devastating earthquake that killed more than 8,000 people on April 25, relief organizations need more support than ever.

To spread awareness of its efforts and expand its reach toward donors, global organization Oxfam America has partnered with location technology company xAd to target mobile ads at the 50,000 digital-savvy people expected to attend Internet Week New York from May 18-24.

The goal is to localize and drive much-needed donations, while overcoming donor fatigue and the misguided notion that the scope of the problem is too large for the average person to help.

The targeted ads, which will be directed to people at or nearby Internet Week venues during the conference's hours and events, will look like this:

Image: xAd

Clicking the ad will lead attendees to Oxfam America's mobile-optimized landing page, which will provide more information on the organization's relief efforts, as well as the ability to donate directly to Oxfam's on-the-ground services to those in need.

xAd sought to work with Oxfam after the company's CEO, Dipanshu Sharma, planned to climb Mount Everest for his 40th birthday this month. After raising some relief funds on his own, Sharma wanted to do more, so xAd reached out to Oxfam to offer its mobile ad platform.

The pro-bono campaign was planned before Tuesday's second earthquake, but now the initiative's impact has even more potential.

"The number of people affected — 8 million — will likely increase as a result of [Tuesday's earthquake]," Mike Delaney, director of humanitarian response for Oxfam America, told Mashable. "The timing of this partnership could not be better. Letting people know about the situation in Nepal, especially after this double disaster, is going to be really important."

Delaney said it's been a race against time for Oxfam America to get people clean water, hygiene kits and emergency shelter before Nepal's monsoon rains hit in just a few weeks. The second earthquake has made it even more difficult; for example, a number of vehicles normally used to deliver supplies were used to take people to hospitals on Tuesday.

Oxfam America's plan is to help more than 400,000 people in Nepal with clean water, sanitation and temporary shelter. So far, it has provided more than 50,000 people with water, and more than 9,000 with shelter.

But Delaney knows these numbers only scratch the surface, and that relief organizations have a long way to go.

"We're seeing plenty of demand. We know from past emergencies that a crisis like this — equivalent to Haiti or even Katrina in the U.S. — these things take four, five years to help rebuild," he said.

As a result, Delaney is hoping the Internet Week campaign will inspire donors to stick with the issue, and continue their support of Nepal beyond a single donation. Oxfam will track donor behavior, while xAd will also measure impact via engagement with the ads.

This isn't xAd's first time using its platform for social good, explained Monica Ho, head of marketing infrastructure at xAd. It has partnered with the Ad Council for more than a year, working on campaigns to spread awareness about Goodwill donations, emergency preparedness, high blood pressure and humane pet adoption.

xAd is also currently working with the Federation for Internet Alerts to reach people in local communities to respond to AMBER alerts, and hopes to extend that to severe weather alerts later this year.

For the Nepal initiative, xAd is "really trying to take advantage of the aggregation of the 50,000 people that Internet Week expects to bring into the city," Ho said.

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